Posts Tagged 'Configurations'

Yesterday, we announced a new pricing model that provides customers with even more visibility and control over cloud infrastructure costs.

While other cloud providers advertise “low” prices for incomplete solutions, they neglect to mention extra charges for essential resources like network bandwidth, primary system storage, and support.

At SoftLayer, our servers already include these necessary resources at no additional charge. That’s because we want to provide our customers with unmatched value and the best performance for price, which makes it easier to see actual costs of cloud solutions and budget accordingly.

Our new pricing model includes a redeveloped ordering and provisioning system that offers even more granular pricing for every SoftLayer bare metal and virtual server, from the processor to the RAM, storage, networking, security, and more.

With this new pricing announcement, we’re also introducing new configuration options for bare metal servers, including increased RAM—up to 3TB—and two new SSD drive options—960GB and 1.2TB.

To fully understand the benefits of our new pricing model, let’s take a look at the example below for an Intel Dual Xeon E5-2620 (4U) server.

You can see that our new pricing saves customers ordering this server $1,780 (or 39 percent) over the old pricing model.

Additionally, as part of yesterday's announcement, we’re launching new pricing for services based on data center location. Location-based pricing displays unique pricing for each data center and removes flat- and percentage-based surcharges, giving customers even more price transparency.

You can learn more about SoftLayer’s pricing philosophy on our website.

As you may have noticed from a previous blog a while back, we here at SoftLayer really like Whataburger quite a bit. For those of you not lucky enough to live in the southern part of the US, Whataburger has a chain of hamburger restaurants that started in Texas but now stretches across the south from Florida to Arizona. For the record, their breakfast taquitos and hamburgers are second to none.

Every so often Whataburger runs an ad that states there are over 34,000 different ways that you can order your Whataburger. Every time I see this ad it makes me wonder, how many possible ways can you order a server with SoftLayer? I’ve always said to myself “one day I will calculate this and write a blog about it”, but I never seemed to get around to it until now. My ultimate motivation to complete this calculation came while discussing our “perceived” limited configuration options with a customer due to having a set of “standard” solutions.

As I started to research the math involved in this calculation, I quickly realized that the total number of combinations for all servers and services we offer would be too much to comprehend or calculate. Therefore I limited the scope to just options for a Nehalem processor server. I also enlisted the help of Greg Kinman, one of our interns, to help me with the math to make sure we got it right. Those Kinmans are multiplying around here (almost as fast as the configuration options)…

Greg calculated that there are 96,631,664,476,185,600,000 different ways to order a Nehalem server. That’s 97 quintillion possibilities for just one server when you take into account the various hardware, software, and service options! Once you start to consider ALL the server options and cloud instances offered, it seems to me that unlimited would be a better description for the configurations SoftLayer offers.

Greg, I owe you lunch for helping me with the calculations today. How about Whataburger?